Are CPU Licenses the culprit for complicated architecture?
February 16, 2007
Today, for the third time in 6 years I have put in as architect – I am being pushed to create un-necessary distribution in the architecture to get around CPU licenses. I am still not convinced if I need to give in to it.
The problem is simple – Lets say I need a CMS, a Search engine, an Imaging library and a portal server in the architecture. All these components can happily co-exist on all machines, but the problem is that all these software have a CPU based licensing, and possibly the vendors will force the client to pay for 3 times as much licensing fee as required if we were to take the simple approach.
So whats the alternative ? Distribute?
If you put a Server for Imaging library, keep CMS, search engines and Portal in their diferent machine, possibly create redundancy by having a spare machine on which all of these are there.
The result is higher network traffic, slower applications and complex deployment operations.
Its high time vendors figure out a way of defining CPU thresholds on each machine to let clients have lets say 1 CPU license on a 4 CPU machine – or atleast monitor the utilization for license fee enforcement rather than enfocing licenses for the entire deployment architecture.
Do you think its reasonable to ask vendors that – I will buy 2 CPU license but put it on 4 machines because I know I am not going to use more than that?
What do you do in these cases ? Negotiate hard, Pay up, go for a different license model with the vendor, or complicate the architecture?
October 15, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Licensing should be by virtual processor instead. Licensing should control the scale of deployment, not the specific implementation/architecture that it’s used in.
Example:
Buy 3 cpu license.
Put one copy on a 8 CPU machine (does multiple things); Application only uses 2 CPUs (does not scale above that without additional licenses).
Put another copy on a 2 CPU machine; Application only uses 1 CPU, such as for a hot backup server or development.
Current CPU licensing models require you’d buy 10 licenses with the above configuration, so you’d be saving 2/3 of your cost.